Dispatch from the Volga

TIME'S Correspondent Walter Graebner, after a trip up the Volga into Russia, filed the following dispatch:

We have met Red airmen, and they are good. At Stalingrad our boat took aboard 100 or so pilots and mechanics who had just been in action at Voronezh. They were members of a famous Stormovik group commanded by Colonel Boris Rivenshstein, one of the Soviet Union's greatest airmen.

Rivenshstein visited our cabin to practice his English and play phonograph records. He is 32, handsome and blue-eyed. He has been flying since he was 17 and has a handshake like Joe Louis'. Stalin has received him three times. His group, fighting almost continuously on the Moscow, Kalinin, Orel and Voronezh fronts, has shot down about 200 German planes, and in six attacks recently destroyed 167 planes on the ground. The group has lost 20 Russian planes and 13 pilots. "Twenty for one is a good enough average," Boris says with smiling eyes and a slap on his thigh.

This record is all the more remarkable because the principal business of Stormoviks is not to shoot down Nazis. The Stormoviks are ground-strafers. With their two cannon and two machine guns, they swoop down to ten or 15 meters, then blast away at tanks, motorized vehicles, grounded planes and troops. One of our visitors was a young lieutenant who had the tail of his Stormovik shot away when he was hardly ten meters (32 ft.) off the ground. Nevertheless he landed well inside the Russian lines, with his hip and both sides of his face injured, and walked back to his camp. He arrived six days after the crash.

Boris and his boys say that the Germans are not a patch on what they were in 1941. Their bombing was pretty bad a year ago, but it is terrible now, and each time they come over they come higher than last time.*

Boris's men, and nearly every other soldier we have met, had one question uppermost in mind about England and America.

"What," they asked, "is the feeling in your country about the second front?"

With no malice whatever, the soldiers let us know that the Russians have been counting on the establishment of a second front. They all said, in one way or another: "If England and America hit Germany from the west, she would collapse this year."

* The high morale of Colonel Rivenshstein's group unfortunately does not alter the fact, attested by Moscow communiques and dispatches, that the German air force has had decisive numerical superiority on the southern front. A local exception to this rule was the Voronezh sector.-- ED.

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